Britain’s few elected mayors have mostly worked well. That doesn’t mean other cities will vote for them

GISELA STUART, a Labour MP, trots round her Birmingham constituency, listening to gripes about traffic, litter and the sundry inconveniences of life in a busy city. She is good at this sort of thing. Ms Stuart became an election-night heroine last year for holding off an expected swing to the Conservatives in her Edgbaston seat. She could expect to fly high in Ed Miliband's Labour Party. But she is swapping that ambition for the chance to run her city. Others hope to follow.

Next year 11 British cities will have the chance to replace the existing local-government structure, in which leaders are chosen from the ranks of councillors, with directly elected mayors. The coalition government sees this as a way of devolving power and strengthening localism. With a population of around 1m, Birmingham will be the biggest city to vote. But all are hefty. Because the political boundaries of British cities often encompass suburbs and even bits of countryside, they can contain more people than larger-seeming American cities (see chart).

Elected mayors are still a political novelty. Londoners embraced a mayoralty in 2000. Since then the capital has had two high-profile leaders: “Red” Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson (pictured), a Tory who has used the job to build his party power base and may return to national politics. Elsewhere, though, only a few towns and a handful of London boroughs have plumped for directly elected leaders.

Britain lags far behind France, where mayors have wide-ranging municipal powers. Germany, too, has gradually embraced elected mayors, previously confined to the south of the country. Now all but a few northern cities elect their leaders directly. German thoroughness manifests itself in requiring that applicants have a training in administration.

Arguments for elected mayors tend to turn on their visibility. A poll conducted in January 2010 found that 57% of people in areas with an elected mayor could identify him or her, compared with only 25% who could identify their leader in traditional council areas. Lord Adonis, a Labour peer who is campaigning for elected mayors, points out that the mayor of Cologne has a web presence 19 times greater than the head of Birmingham's city council.

Small bite, loud bark

London's mayor controls transport policy (hence the capital's congestion charge), oversees the capital's policing through the Metropolitan Police Authority and sets a council-tax “precept”—a small addition to the property taxes levied by boroughs. His regional counterparts probably won't get anything like that degree of freedom. David Cameron, the prime minister, has backed away from earlier plans for powerful “executive mayors”. A consultation on powers, which will conclude in January, hints vaguely that mayors will be “ambassadors and champions” for their area.

Behind the retreat lies a belief that, in fiscally tough times, costs are better controlled from the centre. Plans for mayors have also clashed with schemes to create directly elected police commissioners—which will be put to the public in a separate referendum next autumn. Open “primaries”, in which mayoral candidates would be selected by the public, have been dropped as too expensive. Ms Stuart may want to strengthen local democracy, but she will first have to secure her party's nomination. That means winning a few thousand votes of local Labourites.

Yet the experience of Britain's few existing mayors suggests there are ways of grabbing influence even when formal powers are lacking. Take Middlesbrough, a city in the northern Teesside conurbation. Its mayor is Ray Mallon, a controversial police chief turned local official who showed an early interest in zero-tolerance measures and was elected as an independent. “Robocop”, as he is nicknamed, has since been re-elected twice.

Mr Mallon is ostentatiously green (he drives an electric two-seater car) yet tough. Middlesbrough is full of security cameras attached to loudspeakers, which occasionally boom out warnings to miscreants. An aide describes Mr Mallon's forte as “banging heads gently together” to get things done. He has boosted the self-confidence of a town that is not always loved (it was recently voted the worst place to live in Britain, a charge to which Mr Mallon responded with some force).

Mayors have power because they are perceived to be powerful. Sir Steve Bullock, previously a local Labour council boss who was elected mayor in the south London borough of Lewisham, says he is constantly harangued: “If I go into a supermarket, people come up and tell me what's going wrong.”

Not all the early experiments have worked out well. A negative example is provided by Doncaster, in South Yorkshire. Its first elected mayor, a popular local sportsman, stood down in 2009 following criticism of local social services for failing to stop the maltreatment and murder of a child. He was succeeded by Peter Davies, who has fought councillors over budgets. The city is consulting residents on whether they wish to retreat from the mayoral model: a sign of the fragility of the institution when things go wrong.

So it is by no means certain that Britain's cities will vote for mayors next year. In places like Newcastle and Manchester there is little enthusiasm for a Middlesbrough-type mayoralty. Local governments there are thought to be reasonably well-run, and few want upheaval. In some solidly Labour cities, the reform is derided as a “Tory” gimmick. Councillors in towns like Coventry are already campaigning against a change.

There are reasonable doubts about how effective mayors can be without clear new powers. Sam Sims of the Institute for Government, a think-tank, notes that people are more likely to vote for mayors if they know local government will be reshaped as a result. Deloitte, a consultancy, worries that reform will lead to a mess of overlapping county, district and parish councils, local MPs and mayors.

Elected mayors are an important step on the road to localism. They have proved bolder, more original and more accountable than appointed council leaders tend to be. Mayors will surely acquire more powers as people get used to them. But it will not be easy to persuade people to vote for a vague promise of civic reorganisation, without the powers to match.